While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has quietly completed an election that may also have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan's parliament) on July 10, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats, which, together with Diet seats not up for election and the seats of sympathetic but unaffiliated members, give the coalition a two-thirds majority in the Upper House. It already had a two-thirds majority in the Lower House.

This article can be read together with “Indigenous at Last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir.” The Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) was not the only NGO conference that took place in connection with the G8 Summit in Hokkaido in July 2008. This article discusses another conference, “Peace, Reconciliation and Civil Society: Toward a Sustainable Peace in East Asia and Europe,” which Oda Hiroshi, an anthropologist at Hokkaido University, organized.

The conference focused on achieving reconciliation between different parties in East Asia, especially between Japanese victimizers and non-Japanese victims. Japanese colonization of the Ainu and their land was only one such occurrence of victimization discussed there. How can reconciliation between the Japanese and their victims be achieved? The conference participants debated what to do given that an official apology that includes compensation by the Japanese government is nowhere in sight. They hope that reconciliation attempts by civil society will provide models for the government in the future. This article is authored by Lucasz Zablonski and Philip A. Seaton.